Bad Site Behavior

A few days ago, I saw a link to an article, and I may have even bookmarked it on Del.ico.us to read later, that was from SearchSecurity.com. This is a Tech Target entity, and when I went back later to read the article I was prompted to register. Since there was one field to enter my email address, I went ahead and put in an old hotmail address I don’t use very often, as I’m prone to do with sites like this, thinking once I gave them that, I could read the article.

Nope, once that was input, I was then presented with a page full of profile information, name, phone number, address, IT role, budget, etc. I decided I wasn’t giving them that information, and wasn’t even going to be bothered to fill in fake information, so I simply closed the browser tab.

Lo and behold, when I went over to hotmail, which I do every few days, just to see if there’s anything I might want to read, I had an email reminding me to come back and finish my profile, and 7 other messages from Search Security.

Those messages all had an unsubscribe for that email list option, and another option to edit all my subscriptions. So I went to that link, and discovered that they had created a profile using my email address, and went ahead and subscribed me to 8, yes 8! different lists. Not only that, but when I tried to unsubscribe from them all, I was prompted to fill in all the required information in order to make changes to my profile. You know, all that information that I had decided not to give them before, when I left the site without creating a profile!

So, instead I followed the links to unsubscribe from that individual newsletter. Now I find myself down to 5 subscriptions, because the others have not been delivered yet, and no option but to wait for them to be so I can unsubscribe to them as they come in.

I have tried one other option, sending them an email asking for the profile I never wanted, to be deleted, we’ll see how that works out for me.

Have you had an experience like this with website registration before?

Update: I did get a confirmation email that they have deleted my account, and I’ve yet to see another email from the site, so hopefully, it’s taken care of!

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